INPUT, INTERACTION, AND THE SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNER.Susan M. Gass. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997. Pp. xi + 189. $45.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-115
Author(s):  
James F. Lee

Input, interaction, and the second language learner is, as the title suggests, a view of the relationship among input, interaction, and second language development. Susan M. Gass has written an extremely readable book that explicates many of the most discussed issues in second language learning in the 1990s. Her intention, successfully achieved, is to demonstrate where theories and frameworks coincide, not just collide.

Author(s):  
Harold Andrés Peña

While there has been an upsurge of research studying the relationship of gender and second language learning in cross-cultural contexts, far less has been investigated about preschool children’s gender and learner identities in contexts where English is a foreign language. In this paper I describe how gendered discourses are at stake in the classroom and how these discourses are related to the learner identities of a group of Colombian preschoolers. I use a Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) approach to pin down moments in which the assertion of power is manifested in second language practices like ‘classroom races’ during literacy activities. This assertion of power positions participants differently. Findings suggest the need to understand how children negotiate subject positions discursively in language learning activities. I am suggesting the need to erode discourses of approval that marginalize girls and favour boys.


1994 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merrill Swain

In this article the emotive, social aspects of learning ESL in small group settings are explored. The feelings and beliefs of one learner, an adult Japanese woman, are captured as she reflects on her classroom experiences. It is argued that her conscious reflection about her negative emotions and their sources allowed her to act on them, resulting in enhanced second language learning. It is also argued that it may be as important to help learners deal with the social dimensions as the cognitive dimensions of second language learning in order to experience success as a second language learner.


Author(s):  
Ugochi Happiness Ikonne

Very many factors have been found to influence second language learning. For instance, affective factors such as attitude, motivation and personality have usually been acknowledged to play important role in second language learning. Other factors include environmental factors which could be geographical and/or cultural. This discourse reviewed the various ways in which cultural constraints and cultural differences impede comprehension among second language (L2) learners. Emphasis was on listening, reading, pragmatics and viewing comprehension. It was recommended that language teacher apply strategies and techniques like infantilization, dramatization, excursion, audio and visual resources to concretize their lessons. Also, to bridge the cultural gap between the second language learner and the culture of the target language, acculturation or immersion programme is recommended. This is to ensure deeper contact between the learner and the culture, native speakers and the target language.Key Words: culture, comprehension and second language learning


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Honggai Cai

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of continuation writing on the usages of the second language in the argumentative writing. The research questions in this study are as follows: 1) Whether the language application of the second language learner exists in coordination with the reading text; 2) Whether the continuation writing can promote the learning of vocabulary and phrases in the second language learning; 3)whether the comparative continuation reduce the learner’s linguistic bias. In this study, the experimental group was asked to read the materials first, and through the guidance, attention, and other measures to strengthen the understanding of the reading materials while the control group without reading materials ahead of time blindly write an essay on the same topic and then compare them by corpus. The results of the study indicate that the alignment effect of the experimental group was stronger. The subjects are able to use the words and phrases that appear in the reading materials at high frequency. The research results can provide reference for the continuation writing teaching and research in the field of the second language.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wander Lowie ◽  
Marijn Van Dijk ◽  
Huiping Chan ◽  
Marjolijn Verspoor

A large body studies into individual differences in second language learning has shown that success in second language learning is strongly affected by a set of relevant learner characteristics ranging from the age of onset to motivation, aptitude, and personality. Most studies have concentrated on a limited number of learner characteristics and have argued for the relative importance of some of these factors. Clearly, some learners are more successful than others, and it is tempting to try to find the factor or combination of factors that can crack the code to success. However, isolating one or several global individual characteristics can only give a partial explanation of success in second language learning. The limitation of this approach is that it only reflects on rather general personality characteristics of learners at one point in time, while both language development and the factors affecting it are instances of complex dynamic processes that develop over time. Factors that have been labelled as “individual differences” as well as the development of proficiency are characterized by nonlinear relationships in the time domain, due to which the rate of success cannot be simply deduced from a combination of factors. Moreover, in complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) literature it has been argued that a generalization about the interaction of variables across individuals is not warranted when we acknowledge that language development is essentially an individual process (Molenaar, 2015). In this paper, the viability of these generalizations is investigated by exploring the L2 development over time for two identical twins in Taiwan who can be expected to be highly similar in all respects, from their environment to their level of English proficiency, to their exposure to English, and to their individual differences. In spite of the striking similarities between these learners, the development of their L2 English over time was very different. Developmental patterns for spoken and written language even showed opposite tendencies. These observations underline the individual nature of the process of second language development.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohmani Nur Indah

Studies on language acquisition become the pillar of Psycholinguistics as a branch of Applied Linguistics that deals with the relationship between human’s thought and language as well as how human beings comprehend, acquire and develop their language. Language acquisition does not merely involve children’s first or second language development, but also temporer language disorder –which does not belong to permanent language disorder. Deviation on language development to some extent gets little attention from psycholinguists. Most references on psychology of language discuss language disorder in general, whereas the current issues on this area are still rarely found. The following article deciphers what and how language acquisition can be done and cannot be completed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 822-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Ettlinger ◽  
Kara Morgan-Short ◽  
Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg ◽  
Patrick C.M. Wong

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 136-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Ziegler

ABSTRACTOver the last few decades, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has garnered increasing attention from researchers and educators alike. With a strong and growing body of research demonstrating the efficacy of tasks to support and facilitate second language development and performance (e.g., Keck, Iberri-Shea, Tracy-Ventura, & Wa-Mbaleka, 2006), TBLT has become a leading pedagogical approach. Similarly, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has also grown as a field, with the use and integration of technology in the classroom continuing to increase (Petersen & Sachs, 2015). As these fields have matured, a reciprocal relationship has developed (Lai & Li, 2011), with the literature on tasks and technology seeking to not only examine how technology might support and facilitate language learning, but how TBLT might serve as a framework to more thoroughly investigate CALL. In light of the expanding research on tasks and technology, this review article aims not only to provide a current state of the art of how technology-mediated TBLT facilitates and supports second language development and performance, but also to describe how technology can contribute to our understanding of how features of TBLT, such as task design features and task implementation, influence the success of second language acquisition. Suggestions for possible research agendas in technology-mediated TBLT are also made.


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